is disposal.

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward
conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty
and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate
evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may
search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man
of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little
girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato.
"Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but
Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their
attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which
controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in
goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform
society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the
conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by
preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he
had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange,"
but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in
the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to
all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their
lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations;
"but this is our glory."

Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that
Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented
"the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of
Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he
said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or
Confucian really to be your brother[106]."

"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent
greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths
which they have received." In considering the sources of national
greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and
some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to
be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be
without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow
way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight
as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same
work as